As part of a cross country move, I need to shut down my bank account in my previous home time and do all of my banking out of our new credit union here. My main bottleneck: is my youngest daugher (an adult) - once in a while she needs some money help (she works as a care giver for severely mentally and physically handicapped people and it does not pay well) and the way we had been handling that is she had an account under my account at my previous bank and I could instantaneously move money into her account if she needed the money ASAP… She also no longer lives in that town and has another bank account in addition to that one (which will be shut down when I shut mine down.)
Paypal has a delay. I know these services have to be careful due to worries about being used for “evil” purposes, but is there a good reliable service preferably with a phone app where I can instantly move money from my bank account to her?
Check whether your bank has a mobile app. It may have a simple way to setup another ‘payee’ account and make a EFT pretty quickly. Not really “instant” though, if you really need it faster than “end of business day” than, Venmo or PayPal I guess?
Likewise, my partner uses Zelle every month to send me her contribution to shared costs. Might take a day at most to finalize, but it shows up very quickly. Goes across banks, too; she’s on SunTrust and I’m on Bank of America.
I miss the old service her bank used, PopMoney. It wasn’t any better or worse, but it was fun to ask her to POP ME THAT MONAYYY every month.
Zelle is owned by a consortium of banks who presumably already do these kinds of transfers and just applied a fancy front end for their customers to use. Apparently they have government any business payment options that may charge fees.
I’m reporting you for Plagiarism Mr Penblade, you shall hear from my lawyers forthwith.
But to expand on that, they reason Zelle has no user costs is because the banks are finding it themselves so they don’t have to pay third parties. Basically they don’t have to pay outside parties like Apple Pay, so the transaction costs are lower.
And in a rare case of the market working, they pass this on to the consumer so it costs you nothing to use.
You could have three accounts at your credit union/bank with one having both you and your daughter. Then each of you could move money into out of the shared account as needed without incurring a cost.
It won’t help you, but this is one of those times when Canada’s very centralized major banks come in handy. They’ve long had a consortium called Interac, which sounds similar to Zelle, but it’s ubiquitous. You can email money transfer from any bank in Canada, to any bank in Canada with it. From any computer, browser, or bank app. It’s also behind our debit card system, so works for merchants, too. At a fraction of what credit card fees are.
It’s so good, that it takes us forever to get something like Apple Pay Cash. Because there’s no incentive to go outside the existing system. Except you can’t use Interac to send someone money over text or iMessage, so I’m missing a cool feature, dammit! Email is just soooo slow 😉